Philosophia Longa, Vita Brevis (February 2024 version) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Aesthetic Literacy: a book for everyone, Vol. 1, edited by Valery Vino. Melbourne, Australia: Mont Publishing., 2022
Using 12 intervening aphorisms about art, I move from l’art pour l’art (1836) to "Art for art’s sake is dead, if it ever lived" (Edward Steichen).
Art is long, life is short versione definitiva.pdf
Medical Hypotheses, 2018
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes is one of the major figures of European art. From royal portraits to bizarre, grotesque illustrations, his legacy demonstrates a tortured genius, generating some of the most compelling art ever produced. His story is also the story of Spain during one of the most tumultuous passages of its history. In the winter of 1792–93, Goya experienced a mysterious illness resulting in lifelong deafness. After that, his work became more negative, with thick, bold strokes of dark colour. Scholars have suggested various diagnoses on the basis of Master’s symptoms, but the exact nature of the illness has never been identified
[I have uploaded a copy of the preface to the second edition, in which I respond to reviews of the first edition.] It is a commonplace to say that in antiquity philosophy was conceived as a way of life or an art of living but precisely what such claims amount to has remained unclear. If ancient philosophers did think that philosophy should transform an individual's way of life, then what conception of philosophy stands behind this claim? In The Art of Living John Sellars explores this question via a detailed account of ancient Stoic ideas about the nature and function of philosophy. He considers the Socratic background to Stoic thinking about philosophy, Sceptical objections raised by Sextus Empiricus, and offers readings of late Stoic texts by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Sellars argues that the conception of philosophy as an 'art of living', inaugurated by Socrates and developed by the Stoics, has persisted since antiquity and remains a living alternative to modern attempts to assimilate philosophy to the natural sciences. It also enables us to rethink the relationship between an individual's philosophy and their biography. [Further information at http://www.johnsellars.org.uk/art-of-living.html\]"
This paper examines a number of paintings in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool with a view to extracting certain lessons for life. The paper focuses on life and death, and takes the central theme to be that of finding one’s place within the endless cycles of nature. The moral is that we need to understand that we are a unity of the finite and the infinite, we need to distinguish between the transitory and the permanent, stop obsessing about passing circumstances, stop being overwhelmed by the whims of fame and fortune, and identify with what is of lasting value in our selves in building a life. Don’t fight against the course of events, let things happen naturally through identifying oneself and one’s life with the cosmic rhythm. The paper concerns what it takes to be true to oneself and coming to be the person you know you can be. This is the joy of discovering what you were born to be.
Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 19 (2015) 137–148
The so-called Second Part of monastic writings composed by the 7th century East Syriac author Isaac of Nineveh contains a paraphrased citation from the famous beginning of Hippocrates’ Aphorismoi. The article tackles the issue of Isaac’s awareness of the aphorism and tries to reconstruct its interpretation by the author. Though medical texts were available in the East Syriac monastic milieu of that time, it is not likely that Isaac had at his disposal a complete Syriac translation of the Aphorismoi, but rather his acquaintance with the aphorism was mediated by a source that would more likely have been read in monastic context. A good example offers the treatise De anima by the early 5th century monastic author John the Solitary, whose works exercised profound influence upon entire East Syriac monastic tradition, including Isaac of Nineveh. The given case of a monastic interpretation of a piece of secular wisdom is an illustrative showcase that provides an opportunity to observe a particular sensitivity of the Syriac tradition to medicine and its power to embed it within an appropriate context.